


(and your past is not a rosetta stone)

by A (mumblemutter), cm (mumblemutter)



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Canon Death, Heroes: Volume 5, Incest, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-04
Updated: 2010-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-05 19:08:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblemutter/pseuds/A, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumblemutter/pseuds/cm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter goes crazier, here's how.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(and your past is not a rosetta stone)

**(now)**

Space-time manipulation, Peter realizes, is just about the perfect power to have if you didn't care so much about healing. Flying is useless, and almost all of Sylar's powers are meant to kill.

He goes to see Molly Walker first, somewhere in Delhi, and then he finds Hiro Nakamura. Hiro doesn't seem too perturbed when Peter lands right in front of him, just says, "Peter Petrelli," as if he expected him. Maybe he did, but Peter doesn't have time for it, not now. He just wants a handshake, or in Hiro's case, a hug. And if Hiro notices that he flies in but teleports out, well. That can't be helped.

**(six months gone)**

It's not easy to control, not initially. He freezes time, or he doesn't. He tries to go back two weeks, and ends up in the eighteenth century. He manages to get back to the future, but in an entirely different country. Sometimes he just can't deal with the possibility that he'll end up in the jungles of Peru yet again, and boards a plane instead.

Eventually, he gets better.

In what he still thinks of as the present, but what he's fast realizing isn't, he visits his mother, and she hugs him and asks, "How are you holding up, Peter."

He says, "Okay. I'm okay. I miss him. But it gets better with time, right?"

All of this is true. Except he's been bouncing around for half a year, and a world with a Nathan-shaped hole in it is still one he can't quite bear to live in. Emma smiles at him when he drops by the hospital, out of habit more than anything else, says, "Peter, how was your vacation? Your mother said you wouldn't be back for a while."

"It was fine," Peter says automatically, and when she's distracted he teleports out, doesn't say goodbye.

**(then)**

The first time he goes back somewhere vaguely useful, it's the eighties and he's the only one without embarrassing hair. Except for Nathan, hair cropped military style - he's old enough that Peter recognizes him immediately, young enough that Peter's face won't strike him as overly familiar. He still says though, when Peter leans against the bar counter and offers to buy him a drink, "Do I know you? You look familiar."

"Nah, I guess I have just one of those faces."

Afterwards, Nathan pressing him down into white sheets in some motel room, the afternoon hot and hazy with want, he will wonder if he's changing the future, a little, just by being here. "You can call me Peter," he says, and watches Nathan's smile stumble.

"That's my brother's name," Nathan tells him, and he could have chosen any other, but he wants Nathan calling out the right one, the right way.

**(now)**

It's not even that he couldn't save Nathan's life, he probably can. Only if Nathan's alive at some point in time for over forty years, periods which he can visit as he pleases, that more or less means that Nathan doesn't actually die.

This makes sense, somehow, until he pauses to think about it. And then all the threads he's holding on to in his head start to unravel. Besides, next to saving Nathan, what he wants most is to kill Sylar, which isn't quite as easy as it seems.

 

1.

He kills Sylar before he has a chance to kill anyone else and New York goes nuclear.

 

**(march)**

He visits Nathan when their relationship is at its most tenuous, drawn to a time when most of what he felt for his brother was righteous, helpless anger. He wraps his hand around Nathan's neck and pushes him against a wall. Asks, "Do you remember, maybe two decades ago, you picked up a guy named Peter in a bar."

"What, no. Peter, have you lost your mind? Get away from me." But he doesn't move, and his dick is half-hard against Peter's thigh and his breath is coming in short, shallow spurts.

"You have no idea, Nathan," Peter breathes in hard, presses his thigh between Nathan's legs. "Do you even know what you'll do to me. To people like us. Do you know exactly where it will end."

"Peter, please."

Peter kisses him then, hard and with teeth, because he can't stand the look on Nathan's face. "Fuck you, Nathan," he says after Nathan manages to push them apart, glares at him through narrowed eyes, wiping the blood off his lips. "I'll see you around."

This time Nathan does, in fact, manage to round them all up. It's probably Peter's fault. Once, he was a nurse, and all he wanted to do was to save people. All he wanted was to be special. All that seems distant now, the possibility of a life not meant to be. The future changes, and so does the past, but the sum of all he is, everyone he's loved and everyone he's lost, all of it stays exactly the same.

 

2.

He kills Sylar, but only after he watches a version of himself die.

 

**(too late)**

This time, he pulls at a thread and and then another, and grasps a chance to step in and save Nathan's life. Only he doesn't. Instead he just watches, hidden and unmoving, as his brother's beautiful neck is slit and he bleeds to death all over the tastefully expensive upholstery.

He realizes: all of this and none of this can happen or will happen, or won't.

He realizes: he can do anything, anything at all.

**(now)**

Sometimes he thinks his relationship with Nathan as put into an easily digestible format would probably read like this:

> Dear Peter,
> 
> I'm sorry I screwed you over/betrayed your trust/tried to have you killed. This makes us even for (tick one):
> 
> [ ] Kirby Plaza  
> [ ] shooting me, twice  
> [ ] that whole Adam thing  
> [ ] the times you got into trouble in college  
> [ ] most of your childhood, during which I was just about the only bright spark

He ponders that for a while, then realizes he can probably fix that too, if he tries hard enough.

 

5.

He kills Sylar as a teenager, gawky and insecure, and everything changes.

 

**(now, almost)**

There is no place where he fits, not in any timeline that still exists.

Everything is different.

**(way back when)**

Nathan is six, and Peter freezes everything around them, his brother bright and alive in the middle of it all. He frowns, but when Peter comes closer he just looks up and says, "Ma says I shouldn't talk to strangers. Why did everyone stop walking." He doesn't back away though, just tilts his head curiously.

Peter crouches down until they're face to face, smooths Nathan's hair down. Even then, brown and thick and barely controllable. "It's okay, your mother won't mind. We're family." Nathan's smile is soft and trusting, and Peter says, "If she asks, tell her she was right -" but Nathan doesn't need to know about the end of the world, just yet.

 

7.

He kills Sylar in front of an Elle who tries, but not hard enough, to stop him.

 

**(a different then)**

Eventually he stops being able to keep track.

Eventually he stops being able to change things back to the way they were.

Eventually he stops caring about that, too.

**(the past)**

His brother said once, "The future is not written in stone." Nathan's only ability was flight, he couldn't possibly have understood, the past, the future, the present, all interconnected in a million and one ways, none with a fixed point that's entirely true. His mind collapses sometimes, breaks apart and leaves little bits of himself, trailing light, in one world or another, a future where this happened and a past where this didn't.

"Peter," Nathan says, and he sounds groggy and disoriented. Peter shrinks into the shadows, watches himself, far younger, approach the bed. He collapses at Nathan's feet, and even in the dark, Peter can recall Nathan's smile that night, warm and curved and starkly honest, and the way his palm felt, cupping his cheek.

In a million and one possible moments, this one he wants, needs, to remain constant.

**(the future)**

Everything that's different: He drifts, once in a while, to a time and a place that he's never been able to let go of, a fixed point spinning in a web of a thousand different strands of light. It's not important to anyone but him, the night he stepped forward from the edge of a roof and didn't fall. Only it's all messed up now, and more often than not, no-one is there.

 

10.

He keeps killing Sylar, and absolutely nothing ever changes.

 

**(now)**

Hiro Nakamura finds him, on a rooftop in what's left of New York, what's left of the world. A Hiro Peter's not seen in years, hard and severe and accent almost entirely gone. "Did you do this?" he asks.

Peter shrugs. "Maybe. Maybe all timelines led to here. I can probably go back and change things, eventually."

"How's your head?"

"Hurts like hell." His nose has been bleeding for a while now.

"That's how it goes." Hiro pauses. "Peter, what happened to you." He doesn't sound angry so much as disappointed, resigned. Peter wants to tell him that in all the universes he's created, Charlie always dies, but he suspects Hiro already knows. "You used to have such strength."

"Yeah," Peter says. "Didn't you hear. My brother died."


End file.
